Title: The Peacemakers
Rating: PG-13, T
Characters/Pairing: Haine, Badou, Nill, mention of Bishop.
Warnings: Mentions of violence, language. My craptastic writing.
Word Count: 1,596
A/N: Might be some BadouxHaine undertones, if you squint really, really hard.
Disclaimer: DOGS and all it's characters are the spawn of Miwa Shirou
The Peacemakers
"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God."
Matthew 9:5
Haine watches Badou's smoke snake up into the rafters, trailing venomous tails between the will o' the wisps suspended in the bars of sunlight striping the church's vaulted ribcage. Chiaroscuro is too pretty and poetic a word to use, out of place in this world rife and thriving with heavy howls and ragged fangs.
Haine asks him not to do that.
Badou yawns, stretches, pulling his lips back around his teeth, his limbs all wrong angles against the solid wood. It's unnecessary and obscene, just like everything else about Badou.
Badou asks him what, what is it he shouldn't do.
Haine doesn't answer him right away. He follows Badou's smoke, airily drifting into ceiling shadows and getting caught inside the cobwebs. It's distant and otherworldly, just like everything else about Haine.
Badou chuffs, doesn't deign to repeat himself. He shifts his long spider limbs inside the pew, too many crowded bones and the un-luxury of healed fractures. He makes two points of his knees and plants his boots, bowing his back toward the flagstones. His hair falls into orange loops, but mostly it just falls.
Haine means the cigarette, because the ashes and the chemical stink annoy him. He holds the reply on the point of his tongue for a second, then gives up, lets it eke it out between his teeth. He does that more often now, ever since him and Badou got to the Audi family headquarters too late and found those young girls stacked up waist high in the cellar. They all had unseeing eyes, Bishop told them, and unspeaking tongues, in exchange for the cat ears and tails all the men loved to pull and wrap their hungry hands around.
(Haine had found Nill that night and held her hands so hard he nearly broke them.)
Badou tries and fails to smoke his cigarettes upside-down, excessively hacking and coughing, spluttering on the stray strands of hair that find their way into his mouth.
Haine grins in spite of himself. He is the only one who ever does; Badou is too ridiculous for everyone else. Naoto can't bring herself to take him seriously. Everyone at Buon Viaggio writes him off as an idiot, with a dash of bastard. Nill is alright around him, but she's alright around anyone, once she gets to know them. Bishop…is Bishop, and no one knows what he really thinks, in the depths of his too clever brain behind the black lenses. No one wants to.
It's all true, of course—Badou is a ridiculous, idiotic bastard, loudmouthed, lily-livered, a tactless addict with a penchant for getting himself into situations no one should survive.
Haine doesn't know—maybe he just knows Badou better, has seen him after the swinging automatics and euphoric bloodlust, has dragged him back to Bishop's when he takes too many bullets or has too much to drink, has watched him reach long fingers underneath his eyepatch and move them back and forth when he thinks no one sees.
Maybe it's because Badou knows him better than anyone else, too. Badou's seen him cough up bullets. Badou's heard him swear in guttural German whenever he gets especially pissed off. Badou knows the wide, feral spaces that dilate his pupils when the black dog pokes its bloody, grinning muzzle through his psyche.
Or it could be they're just used to each other. Which sounds like the same thing, but it's not—the same language spoken in a different dialect loses everything in translation.
Badou makes a sound of mild interest, because it's impossible for him to be completely quiet. Even when he shuts up he makes noise; Haine doesn't want to know how.
Nill flickers into his field of view, pure and tragic in ways as soft as her feathers, the wings of her twin black bows trembling like butterflies perched in her hair. She flutters, incandescent as a candle flame, down the opposite aisle, and it's only the sound of her footfalls that confirm her ties with gravity.
Haine leans into his forearms, crossed and grasping the back of the pew in front of him, watching her. Badou, still upside-down, makes small smoky mutters to himself.
She thumps softly up the steps to the altar, making a beeline for the pulpit. She must be fetching the Bible; Bishop keeps his emergency cash in the hollow where the New Testament used to be. After all, he's not really a bishop.
Nill spares them a quick smile, clutching the book to her chest, hurrying back the way she came. She's in a good mood, though, she always is on laundry days when she isn't laced up into some elaborate ruffled contraption. She dances two steps, trapped in the broken light sifting through the stained glass, a gentle swirl of innocence and watercolor, a few harmless feathers falling from her shoulder blades.
Haine smiles his Nill-smile, watches her back as she flits through the exit.
Badou sits up with a gasp, a groan, a thud of his sharp elbows propping him up, looking at Haine dryly with his one eye.
Nill's eyes are green, too, but they're a different shade, and that makes all the difference: Badou's emerald spade digs, digs, and Nill's jade flowers shed their petals one by one.
Badou adjusts his position so they're both to face to face; he does it to get rid of his own blind spots. Haine used to think the redhead just had personal space issues, but he's since learned better.
Badou blunt axes the side of Haine's neck, saying he knows why Haine likes Nill so much.
Haine's red irises wheel upward, knowing this conversation will most likely end with him failing to restrain his urge to strangle the other, leaving Badou with bruises on his neck and ego for a week. He readies himself accordingly, pinning his hands beneath his elbows, and waits for Badou to elaborate—he never needs a cue.
Badou tells him it's because he thinks that Nill is everything that's good in this fucked up world.
One of the wires in Haine's spine hemorrhages, tearing loose into his bloodstream—either that or Badou has actually caught him unawares.
The redhead continues, less than oblivious and more just choosing to keep talking.
She's just like a fucking angel. Unmarred and unscarred, silent as a white marble grave. Never bathed in blood and tissue dismembered, never held pulsating organs in her hands. Always sweet, never sour.
Badou's jaw juts out, twisting his smirk around his cigarette.
And it might have something to do with that Lilly whoever, given how much Haine talks about her in his sleep—
Haine sees it—furry black paws shoving Badou back down to the stones, explosions of red and orange, tongue lolling, gunning for Badou's throat, bang—
He collars himself halfway. Puts Badou back down. Leashes his fury until the night time, when the black dog runs wild through his dreamscapes, severing Nill's wings, eating Naoto's hair, putting bullets between Bishop's sightless eyes, drinking Badou's blood straight from his mouth, the empty hole of his right eye—
Badou looks slightly shocked he's not being throttled at the moment, brushes himself off, murmuring absently in disappointment. Because he's Badou, just as sick and twisted as the rest of them, gets high off of gun residue and tries to get his partner to kill him, when he's not saving his ass.
And Haine—
Haine—
Haine points out a bloodstain on Badou's shirt, flicks the tapered point of his nose when he looks down.
Badou squawks, over the top and long hair, cursing too much and too loudly to be acceptable anywhere, much less a church, a noisy bellows, skinny and orange like a stick of TNT with a perpetually short fuse (Haine always lights the matches, Badou burns himself so often).
Haine laughs bad-naturedly, a few staccato Anglican barks, different from Badou's manic mad hatter giggles but kind of similar, the same song sung in a different key.
Badou's worth that, at least.
Whatever their relationship is—friendship or enmity, amity, amnesty, symbiosis, predator-prey, dynamo and dynamite, lone wolves, stray dogs, white hair and eyepatch—Haine doesn't plan on figuring it out. It would be impossible. Nothing is ever easy with Badou.
The redhead stalks off with an inexplicable gimp, clutching his nose and calling Haine a royal bastard, whimpering to himself about his precious ruined face.
The funny thing is, Badou would probably say the same thing about him.
Haine calls after his retreating back, saying it was already ruined to begin with, fucking pirate ass wannabe.